This
dude nails it. Well, almost can't say I agree with the python
bit. But other than that, yeah, pretty much what's wrong with PHP.
(Add that to what google seems to consider my most popular bit of code,
ever, and, well, hmpf).
I ve just updated the Debian Packaging Tutorial. This new version addresses a few comments and questions I received over the past months.
Note that there are also french and spanish versions of the tutorial, and I m of course open to adding other translations.
The tutorial can be found in the packaging-tutorial package (PDF files are in /usr/share/doc/packaging-tutorial/), or on www.debian.org (see links above).
The atmosphere in Munich s Backstage Werk just before the
opening act to the Mouse on
Mars was very chilled. People sat on the stairs or scattered
themselves over the dance floor while low-fi ambient tunes came
from the speakers. It wasn t loud, you had to try hard to hear the
people mumble.
I have no idea who the opening act was, and their first tune was
very nice and groovy. Then ensued a noise explosion, one could only
pity the electronic equipment that was being asked to perform in
ways that may be described as everything else than you expect ,
and of course, the base beat shook the building; I am quite sure
they didn t use treble at all, but I may also simply have been
unable to hear it. Plus, it seemed to us that the musicians catered
for what may be a widespread decrease of attention span: it was
noticable how they jumped from one thing to the next, not leaving
them (or their listeners) any time to get in the groove.
My brother and I went outside for a bit and talked about today s
music and its simplicity. We postulated the repetitiveness as the
basis of a mass movement, considered scene clubs that played
heavy techno to an audience that is so entirely different to who
historically frequented such musical performances, and in general
tried to avoid assuming a position between simplifying society and
accepting that individual freedom is as eclectic as can be.
When MoM opened, they continued pretty much in line with their
openers and half way through the first tune, I started to wonder
how long I would last, or when it would be reasonable to step
outside again. I had been a little afraid this would happen, having
bought and listened to their latest album Parastrophics in preparation of the
concert and not being able to get into it.
However, what then followed blew us away. Still heavy, still all
over the place, but now they were developing sound scenes, ripping
them apart, having fun playing with and teasing the audience, while
putting on a groove that inevitably made your muscles twitch with
the beat.
David Bowie called MoM the next big thing and I have to give
it to them: MoM have always had a certain aura of that s what your
music is like? we can improve on that! to them, and yesterday,
they continued along those lines with astounding consistency, and
it felt fresh.
It also felt real. They weren t just pushing buttons and
computers making music, they were making music and the computers
were their instruments. Between the two founding members of MoM sat
Dodo Nkishi, drummer and microphone artist, and if you don t
believe, fast, big breakbeat can be performed live, well, you re
wrong.
Most everyone in the room was dancing. And while I was more
swaying in awe, watching and wondering how the heck they are doing
what they are doing, I couldn t contain the bouncing any longer.
They came back for an encore and there was no more stopping the
crowd, Thomas or me.
Three tracks later, they waved goodbye and left, but a bunch of
us simply continued to dance. Thomas questioned who would last
longer and I started yelling loudly for another encore. The lights
turned on, I considered it a slap in the face, but I did not stop
yelling. Others tuned in. And then the lights went off and the band
came back.
Following their 2.5 hour show, gosh was I exhausted. It was a
magnificent show. If you aren t afraid of big beat electronica and
you take pleasure in nonstandard art, I heartily recommend you
ensure that MoM aren t soon playing near
you without you there.
PS: MoM will play at the (D sseldorf Open-Source
Festival)[http://www.open-source-festival.de/en/] on 30 June
2012!
PPS: Now I listen to Parastrophics and I am really enjoying
it.
NP:
Mouse on Mars: Parastrophics
Conrad Sanderson released a bug-fix version 3.0.1 following up on the very
recent 3.0.0 version of his excellent
Armadillo C++ template library for
linear algebra. I made a new
RcppArmadillo
release 0.3.0.1 which just appeared on CRAN.
The short NEWS entry follows below.
0.3.0.1 2012-04-12
o Upgraded to Armadillo release 3.0.1
* fixes for compilation errors
* fixes for potential aliasing issues
Courtesy of
CRANberries, there
is also a diffstat report
for 0.3.0.1 relative to 0.3.0
As always, more detailed information is on the
RcppArmadillo page.
Questions, comments etc should go to the
rcpp-devel mailing list
off the R-Forge page.
Many websites have addresses that use a www.-
prefix. Some people are encouraging this
practice, other are advising against
it.
I, for one, think this prefix makes sense and is really useful, so here is
an explanation of my opinion. In a nutshell: the Wold Wide Web is one Internet
service among many other such as domain name, mail, mailboxes or instant
messenging; using a dedicated prefix allows to distribute all these services to
specific servers in a convenient way.On Internet, you can expose several services, the most common being domain
names (DNS), websites (HTTP), incoming mail (SMTP), outgoing mail submission
(submission), mailbox fetching (POP) or consultating (IMAP) and instant
messenging (XMPP).
Constraints
Modern Internet services can have constraints such as load balancing,
failover and most importantly the
possibility to use specific servers for each service instead of having
all of them on the same server.
Dedicated records
Some service were designed or revised to take these contraints into account;
this include the domain name, incoming mail and instant messenging, by using
dedicated DNS records:
example.com. NS roquefort.example.com. example.com. MX 10 morbier.example.com. _xmpp-server._tcp.example.com. SRV 10 100 5269 morbier.example.com.In that example, the name service of
example.com. is
provided by the server Roquefort while the incoming
mail and instant messenging service are provided by Morbier
Dedicated prefixes
On the contrary, some services were not designed to take these constraint
into account, and may be too fossilized to be revised for that; this includes
the Web and mailbox service. A convenient way to work around the antiquated
design of these services is to use a well known prefix:
www.example.com. CNAME ossau-iraty.example.com. smtp.example.com. CNAME morbier.example.com. pop.example.com. CNAME morbier.example.com. imap.example.com. CNAME morbier.example.com.In that example, the Web service of
example.com. is
provided by the server Ossay-Iraty while the email
submission and mailbox services are provided by Morbier.
Readability and flexibility
Using dedicated records and prefixes increases the consistency and
readability of a DNS zone, since it allows to refer to the servers by their
canonical host name, and to define their IP addresses once and for all:
; Services
example.com. NS roquefort.example.com.
example.com. MX 10 morbier.example.com.
pop.example.com. CNAME morbier.example.com.
imap.example.com. CNAME morbier.example.com.
www.example.com. CNAME ossau-iraty.example.com.
; Hosts
roquefort.example.com. A 192.2.0.12
AAAA 2001:db8::12
morbier.example.com A 192.2.0.42
AAAA 2001:db8::42
ossau-iraty.example.com. A 192.2.0.51
AAAA 2001:db8::51
You can think of that practice as connecting dots between services and
hosts:
name service Roquefort incoming mail Morbier mailboxes Ossau-Iraty websiteWith such a DNS zone, it is very easy to identify which server is hosting each service. Using host names rather than IP addresses multiple times reduces the information duplication, which in turn facilitates future chances and reduces the risk of error (it is easier to swith the website from Ossay-Iraty to Morbier than from 192.2.0.51/2001:db8::51 to 192.2.0.42/2001:db8::42).
The Debian Project is pleased to announce that registration is now open for DebConf12, which will take place in Managua, Nicaragua, from Sunday 8 July to Saturday 14 July 2012. The conference will be preceded as usual by one week of DebCamp, from Sunday 1 July to Saturday 7 July.
As previous years, three different registration options will be available: Sponsored, Professional and Corporate. Through the Sponsored category, the Debian Project intend to help some people attend who would not be able to pay for their own travel to DebConf. The Corporate category, with a USD 1300 (EUR 1000) registration fee is intended for those attending DebConf as representatives of companies. The Professional category, with a USD 650 (EUR 500) registration fee, is intended for any individual or company who wants to help the conference by paying the direct costs of their attendence.
It will only be possible to apply for food and accommodation grants and/or travel grants until 15 May. For more detailed information about how to register, please see the separate announcement from the DebConf team.
Call for papers
Debian invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for its DebConf12 conference. Submissions are not limited to raditional talks: you could propose a performance, art installation, debate, or anything else. Official submissions will be accepted until 1 June 2012, 23:59 UTC.
This year, we will continue to organize some talks into thematic tracks. If you have a proposal for a DebConf track, please contact <debconf-team@lists.debconf.org>. Previous examples included Debian Science, Debian Infrastructure, and Community Outreach tracks. If you would like to be a track coordinator, please volunteer on that list. Detailed information on how to submit an event are available on the mail from the DebConf team.
The DebConf team just sent out a press release announcing the dates
for DebConf12 in Nicaragua.
A few years ago I started to run my own server. This was an interesting challenge back then but today I only consider it a waste of time and money. Therefore I'm searching for (a) service provider(s) to substitute my self hosted applications:
phpMyAdmin is very popular tool, but for whatever reason number of contributors is not that high as you would expect in such famous project. We're not looking only for developers, basically anybody can help!
Working with phpMyAdmin will give you great opportunity to participate in one of most popular free software projects (we're constantly ranked in 20 most downloaded projects on SourceForge.net for many years). You can learn a lot and extend your knowledge by cooperating with other skilled people. And of course you can use this reference in your resume :-).
So how you can help? You can help with translating, writing documentation, creating video tutorials, bug screening or coding. You can see all possibilities in more details on our website.
Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 3 comments Flattr this!
I ve thrown a bit of work at the wall, and some of it stuck. I ve been working (slowly) on GeoParse, which is a (hopefully pythonic) library to clean, pamper, separate and really dig into fairly low-quality GPS data (like, say, from Google Latitude)
Just the basics are in place now, but work s slowly progressing. Hopefully, I should have something workable in the short-term future.
Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Principles behind the Agile ManifestoAfter two and a half years at Smoothwall, I'm moving on - Friday is my last day. Since I joined the development team, we have adopted Agile development, set up a pretty nifty Gerrit/Jenkins code review + integration system, and introduced dpkg for package management. Along the way, I helped with a bunch of important features for the business, like a ground-up rewrite of the web filter, and time-based browsing usage quotas. I will be starting at CV-Library on Monday, for a whole new set of challenges. They're based in Fleet, so I'll have an hour-long commute each way on the train. I've been assured by an expert in these matters that facilitating wage slavery is a comparatively more ethical pursuit than facilitating internet censorship. :) To make the commute somewhat more bearable, I'm moving house on Saturday. So far, the packing's going quite well...
This went out to d-d-a already but I figured that this might be of
interest here too:
The fifth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen,
Germany. Eight persons attended which is an all time high! This is a
short summary of what happened during the weekend:
Conrad Sanderson has released a new major version 3.0.0 of his excellent
Armadillo C++ template library for
linear algebra. A corresponding new release 0.3.0 of
RcppArmadillo
is now on CRAN.
This follows four pre-releases of Armadillo which we packaged as before, but
for reasons
detailed in another post
did not send to CRAN.
All that said, here are the NEWS entries for all release since the last
non-test release:
0.3.0 2012-04-10
o Upgraded to Armadillo release 3.0.0 "Antarctic Chilli Ranch"
* added non-contiguous submatrix views
* added shorthand for inverse: .i()
* added hist() and histc()
* faster repmat()
* faster handling of submatrix views with one row or column
* faster generation of random numbers
* faster element access in fixed size matrices
* better detection of vector expressions by sum(), cumsum(),
prod(), min(), max(), mean(), median(), stddev(), var()
* expressions X=A.i()*B and X=inv(A)*B are automatically converted
to X=solve(A,B)
0.2.40 2012-04-04
o Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.99.4 "Antarctic Chilli Ranch (Beta 4)"
* fixes for handling expressions with fixed size matrices
0.2.39 2012-04-02
o Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.99.3 "Antarctic Chilli Ranch (Beta 3)"
* faster repmat()
* workarounds for braindead compilers (eg. Visual Studio)
0.2.38 2012-03-28
o Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.99.2 "Antarctic Chilli Ranch (Beta 2)"
* added .i()
* much faster handling of .col() and .row()
* expressions X=A.i()*B and X=inv(A)*B are automatically converted
to X=solve(A,B)
0.2.37 2012-03-19
o Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.99.1 "Antarctic Chilli Ranch (Beta 1)"
* added non-contiguous submatrix views
* added hist() and histc()
* faster handling of submatrix views
* faster generation of random numbers
* faster element access in fixed size matrices
* better detection of vector expressions by sum(), cumsum(),
prod(), min(), max(), mean(), median(), stddev(), var()
Courtesy of
CRANberries, there
is also a diffstat report
for 0.3.0 relative to 0.2.36
As always, more detailed information is on the
RcppArmadillo page.
Questions, comments etc should go to the
rcpp-devel mailing list
off the R-Forge page.
pip install django-money will give you a working set of Django fields that handle Money and Currency. Read below for how that happened.
I began this Easter weekend trying to finish up one of my pet-projects and get it ready to publish. The goal of the website is to compare providers, of the same thing, from around the world.
Representing prices is simple. A float will do if you are in a hurry.
Except.
When you need to perform calculations and you run into rounding errors. At that point you will likely discover the Decimal module.
Which also works perfectly fine. And if you only ever deal in a single market that is fine.
But across markets? That requires Money. Money is normally defined as a value and currency. Once you have both of those, you can then do cross-market comparison and upgrade you program to handle multi-currency easily.
I hoped that I was not the only person who had realised this, so I started to look around.
And I struck gold! I found Python Money. It even included appropriate Django fields as well.
Unfortunately it had had no updates since 2008. . Worse it didn't work so well. I continued my search.
I kept on looking and found Django Money. Even better. This separated out the Django support and the Python support.
It turned out Jakewin's py-moneyed was actually a fork of Limist's py-moneyed.
So I set about retrieving every fork and comparing them.
<aside>Aside: There should be a git hubclone command which will add every fork of a project as an upstream so you can easily compare what has occurred and what has happened amongst them.</aside>
It turns out that Jakewin's version was good, just out-of-date. It mentioned waiting until a pull request has been merged in to limist's version.
Which had been done a while ago. And Jakewin's Django-money (djmoney) was nicely done too, unittests and all. It had just bitrotted compared to newer versions of Django (and South).
I discovered there were a set of forks of django-money at github too. I analysed them all, and basically only jakewins's and reinbach's mattered.
I created fixes for jakewins and reinbach's version.
I also opened up on an issue asking limist's to tag and upload a new version of py-moneyed.
I also got a response from limist and now you can do pip install py-moneyed and get a useful, working, version.
And reinbach also responded and now you can do pip install django-money and get a working, usable, representation of Money within Django.
It turned out to be a productive, if yak-shaving, weekend after all.
With the latest release of Spacewalk PostgreSQL seems to be supported properly
- finally. Also there are efforts
to support Debian as a client system. So I'm thinking about using the upcoming BugSquashingParty in Salzburg to
As student application period of Google Summer of Code 2012 is over, it's time to look at proposals we got for phpMyAdmin.
First of all we got slightly less proposals than in past years (38 this year, 52 in 2011 and 68 in 2010). This is probably related to the fact that we heavily focus on code cleanup this year and this is definitely not that interesting topic as adding new features. I think quality has also slightly improved, but still there were few completely bogus applications for totally unrelated projects.
Also as usual, people tend to leave submission for very last date:
(and then complain, that they don't have enough time to submit patch as described in our applicant guide).
Quite unsurprisingly the most interesting topic seemed to be frames removal, where we got few really good proposals. You can see how other topics were frequent in following chart:
Please note that the numbers are not 100% accurate as some proposals really did not fit into above categories.
Anyway we're just waiting for last people submitting patches today and evaluation will finalize in upcoming days. Of course you will know the results from Google on April 23rd.
Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!
Stop using CAPTCHAs. It s time to switch to DLT: Design, Limit and Trapdoor.
[a certain website] has the evil bad wrong Google reCaptcha on the edit page to stop disabled users, so screw it. Google s reCaptcha seems to be spreading again, obstructing more people when accessing more websites. Is there a reason for that? The re in reCaptcha stands for replace with real anti-spam, please!I wrote the above about two years ago and it s not getting any better. I ve written similar things over the last ten years, as have many others, and I ve always sought to avoid using physical ability tests as a way to cut down spammers. Why do people keep reaching for the reCaptcha non-captcha or things that use similar bad eyetests like Mollom? So most online messages may be spam, but those physical ability tests do nothing to test for spam. They re trying to detect computer submissions (the TCHA in CAPTCHA is meant to be Telling Computers and Humans Apart), but that s really bad when the computer is helping someone with a disability to access the internet. People from the home of the CAPTCHA describe access for sight and hearing-impaired users as an important open problem for the project (Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and John Langford. Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically. In Communications of the ACM). Until that problem is closed, CAPTCHAs should be considered defective and removed whenever possible. What webmasters should do instead is DLT:
Next.